Poor Angels

At this hour the soul floats weightlessly through the city streets, speechless and invisible, astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones of dusk suddenly filling the urban sky while the body sits listlessly by the window sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move, too weary to stand up or to lie down. At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me,” while the body sits glumly by the window listening to the clear summons of the dead transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal. Some nights it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strange, unlikely tethering, a furious grafting of the quick and the slow: when the soul flies up, the body sinks down and all night—locked in the same cramped room— they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air with the sound of a low internal burning. How long can this bewildering marriage last? At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire of stars flaming on the other side of the sky, but the body stares into an empty night sheen, a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels, feverish old loves: don’t separate yet. Let what rises live with what descends.